the scientific study of how individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by other people

Social contact

the idea that human societies have developed basic rules of social and moral conduct, which members of the societies implicitly agree to follow

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Behaviorism

anapproach in psychology that assumes that behavior can be explained purely in terms of stimulus – response connections established through experience and reinforcement .

Gestalt theory

an approach that assumesthat peoples’ overall, subjective interpretations of objects’ physical features, and that objects are perceived in their totality, as a unit, rather than in terms of their individual features.

Accessibility

the ease with which a schema comes to awareness

Associative network

a very large system of schemas that are linked together on he basis of shared meaning or shared experience; it is one way to conceptualize how information is organized in memory.

Autobiographical memory

stored information about the self, such as goals, personality traits, past experiences, and other qualities

Automatic process

a judgment or thought that we cannot control, which occurs without intention, very efficiently,and sometimes beneath our awareness

Availability heuristic

the tendency to base judgment on how easily relevant examples can be thought of

Blank lineup

a group of individuals that does not include the suspect; everyone in the line up is known to be innocent

Categorization

the process of recognizing and identifying something

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Chronic accessibility

the degree to which schemas are easily activated for and individual across time and situations

Cognitive miser mode

a view of information processing that assumes people usually rely on heuristics to make judgments and will engage in careful, thoughtful processing only when necessary.

Controlled process

a judgment or thought that we command, that is intentional, that requires significant cognitive resources, and that occurs within our awareness

Counterfactual thoughts

reflections on how past events might have turned out differently.

Downward counterfactual thoughts

reflections on how pat events might have turned worse

Encoding

the process of getting information into memory, including attention, comprehension, and storage

Heuristic

an informal rule or shortcut is used to make everyday judgments

Hindsight bias

the tendency for people to overestimate the predictability of known outcomes.

Illusory correlation

the belief that to variables are related to one another when, in fact, they are not

Mood-congruent recall

the idea that positive feelings will activate positive memories and negative feelings will activate positive memories and negative feelings will activate negative memories.

Outgroup homogeneity effect

the tendency for people to overestimate the similarity within groups to which they do not belong.

Perseverance effect

the tendency for people to make self-evaluations that are consistent with information that has been discredited.

Priming

the process by which that activation of a schema increases the likelihood that the schema will be activated again in the future.

Reconstructive memory

the process of trying to rebuild the past based on cues and estimates

Representative heuristic

the tendency to judge the likelihood that a target belongs to a category based on how similar target is to the typical features of the category

Retrieval

the process of getting information out of memory

Schemas

mental representation of objects or categories which contain the central features of the object or category as well as assumptions about how the object or category works.

Self-serving judgments

perceptions or comparisons that enhance the perceived worth of the self.

Sequential lineup

the procedure of showing an eyewitness each individual in the group separately rather than together in a simultaneous line.

Social cognition

the study of how information about people is processed and stored.

Spreading activation

the process by which the use of one schema increases the likelihood that other, related schemas in memory will also be used.

Stereotype

a set of characteristics that a perceiver associates with members of a group